Posts Tagged ‘postmortem’

If you have been following my friendfeed, you may have noticed I decided sharing my delicious links there was overkill, so I stopped. Instead, I’m going to try summing up a few interesting blog posts I’ve read and websites I’ve seen this past week. I may stick to this, I may do it more often, I may stop completely. I’ll try to keep it to things you may not have seen, and I’ll also try to stay away from really timely stuff, since I probably should have already twittered or posted that if I was going to. I’ll also probably pull out and post separately for topics that seem worth discussion beyond just “that’s cool.” So what’s left for this post? Let’s find out…

+ Launched 6 weeks ago, but I just heard about it: zembly. Coming out of Sun Microsystems, zembly is an online social simple software development platform, for creating facebook apps, meebo apps, widgets, and iphone web apps. To explain, you can go to their website (if you can get into the beta, which is somewhere in between private and public I think), see the top apps created so far, copy one over into your account, modify it and publish it to facebook right there, on the spot. They host the apps for you. Its functionality is definitely limited so far, but it seems incredibly promising. We need easier ways for more people to develop and share better software to use all over the place, and the web as a true software platform (level 3 in Marc Andreessen’s world) is a big step in that direction.

+ Writing a postmortem on a failed startup is incredibly valuable to the community, and I’m sure it takes guts. They often contain excellent insights better shared than kept close, and this is no exception: Monitor110: A Post Mortem. If you follow fred wilson or brad feld, you’ve seen this already. If not, here’s the author’s list of the “7 deadly sins” that he believes together prevented the company’s success:

The lack of a single, “the buck stops here” leader until too late in the game

No separation between the technology organization and the product organization